INTRODUCTION A LIVING ENTITY
The Qur’an’s moment of blossoming was entirely unexpected.
At twilight on a mid-March morning in the year 610 CE, darkness clung to Mecca as the city slumbered in silence. Perched on the edge of a mountaintop cave overlooking the scene below, forty-year-old Muhammad sat cross-legged. Breathing in the crisp, pre-sunrise air with eyes closed, he sensed a cool breeze gently brush his cheeks. The morning dew amplified the scent of early spring wildflowers. In the distance, the chirping of crickets echoed amidst the occasional hooting owl and howling wolf.
Predawn provided a moment of serenity for Muhammad. The self-made entrepreneur possessed a considerable fortune and a beautiful mansion, where his devoted wife and four daughters slept soundly, awaiting his return. A respected member of society, he was renowned for his discerning mediation skills. Yet wealth and prestige had proved unfulfilling. For four years Muhammad had retreated up the mountain seeking deeper purpose. Week after week, the cave atop Mount Hira became his elevated meditation spot, a sanctuary from the bustle of mercantile Mecca.
This early morning appeared to be like hundreds Muhammad had experienced before. He slowly opened his eyes as the first sliver of refracted sunlight broke over the horizon, splitting the inky darkness. At that moment, a sudden contraction seized his chest near his heart. A terrifying tightness compressed his lungs as a word seemed to resound through his soul, powerfully radiating unstoppably like a cosmic call: “Iqra!”
Yet as soon as the word emerged, filling the vast emptiness, the pang in his chest faded as abruptly as it had struck. Muhammad sat gasping in stunned silence, staring wide-eyed toward the horizon. He shivered in the intense silence that followed. Just as Muhammad began to allow himself to relax, another compression seized him, and the word again emerged: “Iqra!”
Muhammad sat stupefied. Then an even more animated compression sounded through his soul; an outburst of luminous words flowed like a chanted river of intense emotions. Five short phrases shattered the silence and seemed to echo off the surrounding mountains with vibrating energy illuminating the darkness.
Blossom forth,
Inspired by your rejuvenating Divine Mentor,
Who revives the dormant to forge empowering connections.
Dare to blossom,
As your Divine Mentor provides spiritual comfort.
The Visionary One, who guides the unlocking of layers of learning,
Elevates the stagnant to once-inconceivable heights.
The key word Iqra that had taken three contractions to emerge literally meant “blossom forth” or “be born”—a call to a new being to break out of the darkness of obscurity and emerge into the outside world. In contrast to the generic Arabic word for “birthing” (walada)—which can encompass stillbirths, premature births, and babies born with defects or problematic outcomes, the term qara’a implies a healthy birth of something destined to survive. The ancient Arabs would say Qara’a-til-Mar’ah (“the woman delivered a healthy birth”), Qara’a-tir-Riyah (“the winds fertilized fields sparking their blossoming”) and Qara’at-il-Azhar (“the flowers blossomed”).
In modern times, Iqra is frequently translated as “recite” or “read,” yet these are secondary connotations, ones not particularly relevant for an illiterate like Muhammad. Iqra issued a command to unfurl what was carefully nurtured within and finally share it with the world, allowing an inner truth to be revealed after a protracted period of incubation—like a bud finally daring to blossom and expose itself to the elements.
Muhammad did not know what to make of this formidable force that had emerged through his soul, except that once it had been revealed there was no turning back. The five Arabic phrases sounded like nothing ever heard before, both in terms of poetic composition and provocative message. The society of the Arabian Peninsula prized stagnation above all else as a means of self-preservation. Daring to open up to change was the antithesis of everything Arabia stood for—as Muhammad would soon discover when he repeated this revelation in public a week later in the center of Mecca, only to be ridiculed.
The Qur’an, in other words, had been revealed into an unwelcoming world that would instinctively reject it. Nor was the prophet through whom it was inspired prepared for the responsibilities of its guardianship. He had been caught completely off guard and was unprepared for the immense obligation before him. As he fled down the mountain, Muhammad trembled while repeatedly whispering, “Iqra … Iqra … Iqra.…”
Would the new entity now entrusted to Muhammad manage to survive? Would its unique nature be a blessing or a burden? Muhammad did not know it yet, but on the first anniversary of this mystical morning, the nascent entity would not only name itself Al-Qur’an (“The Blossoming”) but address these very questions by declaring: “We did not reveal the Qur’an to weigh you down, but rather to liberate and elevate for a lasting legacy anyone willing to listen with an open mind.”
Over the twenty-two-year life-span of its unfolding, the Qur’an would face daunting challenges and fierce opposition. Its unique character inspired some, but greatly threatened many others. Rather than open themselves to its call, they would respond by attacking the Qur’an’s style, message, and prophet. Trying to convey the art of blossoming in a barren desert, the Qur’an would have to develop dynamic ways to relate to its harsh environment while remaining true to its founding message and core values.
The Qur’an would ultimately go on to inspire some of the greatest innovative minds in history. To appreciate how it changed the world requires understanding its life. And so, dear reader, I present you with the very birth of the Qur’an as it emerged from the realm of timelessness into the temporal world. Behold it and wonder.
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The day I was born, my parents attached a miniature Qur’an pendant to my swaddle with a safety pin featuring a baby-blue teddy bear. About an inch in length, the book featured the entire Qur’an in tiny print, safely enclosed within a twelve-karat-gold casing. The talisman lay on the left side of my chest above the heart.
The same pendant was affixed to my newborn brother three years later. Intrigued by the peculiar object, I fiddled loose the top clasp when no one was looking and managed to slide out the miniature book inside. Flipping through the pages revealed a mysterious script. But then I faced a mini-crisis: try as I might, the tiny book would not fit back in its case. So I slipped the book into my pocket—where it would remain for nearly a decade. Day after day, I carried around the miniature without knowing what it was, yet sensing that it had some special significance.
Though my parents rarely mentioned the word “Qur’an” to me, every night at bedtime my mother would chant a mysterious Arabic refrain while putting me to sleep. Only years later did I realize she was reciting the Qur’an’s brief opening and closing chapters to help protect her young children from nightmares as we slept. And when my little sister developed a skin ailment, my mother took her to a cleric for healing. Using charcoal, he wrote a Qur’anic passage on her skin (which I later discovered was the iconic Ayat-ul-Kursi).
At age five, I noticed that my relatives had a foot-long brown leather set of cassette tapes featuring Qur’anic chanting by a famous Egyptian reciter. They played the recordings only when someone died. During the three days of mourning, the tapes ran on a loop to assist the soul of the deceased to ascend to heaven. The chanting sounded melancholic and consoling, establishing an initial association in my mind of the Qur’an with death and mourning.
High on our living room wall my father hung a red velvet pouch containing a copy of the Qur’an. Most of the time it remained there unread. Occasionally it would be taken down to recite a few verses after someone died, before being passed around for the whole family to kiss in reverence (and only after we had first bathed). As children we had no substantive engagement with the book, which functioned as a purely honorific object. This was typical of most Muslims of my generation growing up in the West.
Above all, the Qur’an to me as a child was mysterious and foreign. I felt my skin shiver from its melodic and rhythmic chanting, and I watched its enigmatic language move adults to tears. My young mind translated mystery into intrigue and curiosity. I had to understand what made this collection of paper and ink so special. Why was it revered as a source of healing and protection? Was it just a talisman or was there substance in the words I could not read?
At age ten, I set out to find a Qur’an teacher who could open a gateway into this unknown world. Every other day after school I would ride the bus for an hour to study with a young African scholar for two-hour sessions. He sat opposite me cross-legged on the floor, our knees touching. I was captivated by the huge bookcases behind him laden with decorated Arabic tomes. My teacher placed a large blue book between us and began guiding me to read the opening chapter of the Qur’an. In our first session, it took two hours just to limp through the first line as I struggled to precisely pronounce the letters.
I was by far the most disadvantaged of my teacher’s pupils, most of whom had grown up in the Middle East and already knew how to read and write Arabic. Some of my fellow students mocked my poor skills and insisted I would never make it. But despite encountering a right-to-left script and a tongue-twisting ancient Semitic language, I was determined to excel. After several weeks of consistent study, I had impressed my teacher with my progress. “I will have a gift for you next week,” he revealed as we parted one evening.
The next week at the end of our session he handed me a pocket-sized navy-blue book with a floral pattern cover featuring the word “Al-Qur’an” written in Arabic calligraphy. I embraced it like an amazing treasure box that contained hidden gems and began marking up the pages to guide pronunciation, intonation, and rhythmic changes during reciting. For over two decades, working with over a hundred different teachers, I kept adding notes to the same original book, which I carried in my right pants pocket (the left pocket contained the old miniature). Whereas it had once evoked death and mourning, the Qur’an became a source of dynamic learning.
My teacher introduced me to several other instructors and together they propelled me forward on the path to becoming a hafith (literally, “conserver” or “guardian”)—a term signifying someone who has memorized the Qur’an. I still did not understand what Arabic words meant, so memorization involved processing sounds, melodies, and emotions. It also required extreme discipline. I would lock myself in my room for hours, constantly repeating passages. To guide me, my teachers invoked a classic mantra of Islamic scholars: At-tikraru yad‘u ilal-qarar—“Constant repetition leads to stability of memorization.”
It took months to build up muscle memory, sometimes repeating a single letter seven thousand times to condition my vocal cords. Memorizing a page at first took nearly two hours, but eventually I could process up to ten pages an hour. Memorization became a kind of intimacy, entrusting something precious to my heart and mind, not merely my pocket. As I internalized how to recite it, the Qur’an became an integral part of my identity, connecting me to an important lineage.
My teachers revealed to me how traditional Islamic scholarship rests upon unbroken chains of transmission called Isnad (Literally, “to lean back on for support”—an unbroken transmission of religious authority similar to the Rabbinic concept of Semikhah) that link each student back in time through the generations to Muhammad himself. To bring my own Isnad to life, my teachers would occasionally gift me books written by ancestors in my chain, like Imam Ad-Dani who lived in eleventh-century Spain.
By age twelve I had memorized all the Qur’an’s words, yet understood few of them—a bit like repeatedly watching a foreign film without any subtitles, knowing the scenes in detail without comprehending the dialogue. My teachers began intensive sessions on Arabic grammar, syntax, and etymology, empowering me to at last begin to decipher what I was reciting. As my classical Arabic skills developed, I uncovered layer after layer of meaning, peeling back nuances each more profound than the prior. The process was what the Qur’an’s first words describe as “unlocking layers of learning.”
My teachers then introduced me to the academic field of Qur’anic exegesis called Tafsir. Derived from the Arabic concept for separating strands of raw flax and weaving them into a garment, the discipline of Tafsir was developed by Muhammad to help make the Qur’an accessible and relevant to popular audiences. The field today comprises thousands of volumes of commentary aiming to assist readers in making sense of the Qur’an to help improve their lives.
Studying Tafsir made me realize that the Qur’an provides no linear history. It functions rather as a multidimensional loop, featuring only one complete narrative (recounting the life of Joseph), and mostly alludes briefly to other stories rather than reproduces them. The discipline also highlighted how scholars widely diverge in their understanding of chapters, verses, and even individual words. I was amazed to discover that the legendary scholar Ar-Razi produced a commentary of over two hundred pages on just seven short verses.
After more than a decade of intense study, the Qur’an still felt distant and abstract. My insatiable drive to unlock its mysterious layers of meaning led me to Mecca. After visiting the Ka‘bah shrine at the center of the city, I trekked toward Mount Hira, eager to experience the birthplace of the Qur’an firsthand. As an avid North American hiker, I envisioned Hira as an amazing mountain vista like the picturesque Rocky Mountains.
Hira literally means “the place of resolving doubt”—yet for me visiting the site produced the opposite effect. The winding stairway to the top was packed, with massive crowds jostling past souvenir hawkers and beggars with fake deformities trying to exploit the fervor of devout pilgrims. Graffiti praising Muhammad dotted the rocks near the cave’s entrance, which I discovered was smaller than expected. Only a handful of pilgrims could cram inside at once, and the prospect of entering sparked claustrophobia.
Disappointed to discover Mount Hira did not yield the anticipated transcendent experience, I plopped down on the back side of the mountain and looked out over the semi-wilderness outside Mecca. Hira, I suddenly realized, was not a destination but a state of being. The “place of resolving doubt” was inside the Qur’an, not any physical location. After all, Muhammad himself never returned to Hira’s peak following his predawn revelation. The real journey before me was to delve deeper into the book I had been carrying in my pocket all these years.
For the next decade of my life, I dove into the field of Tafsir with wide-eyed curiosity, traveling the world to learn from living legends. In Damascus, I studied at the feet of eminent scholars like ‘Abdur-Razzaq Al-Halabi and Muhammad Sukkar. These specialists possessed remarkably short chains of transmission back to the founder of the discipline of Tafsir, Ubayy Ibnu Ka‘b. This erudite scholar had himself been a prize pupil of Muhammad, serving as one of his top scribes. Learning from the custodians of centuries-old tradition inspired me to try to articulate the spirit of Islamic scholarship in accessible ways. The book you now hold forms a small contribution to the intricate dialogue of Tafsir.
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For the general public today, the Qur’an remains an enigma. Unlike the Bible, it is not a straight narrative, but rather meditates over a broad range of themes in often abstract poetic language. It is also the product of only one prophet, weaving together hundreds of diverse revelations from a twenty-two-year period into one complex whole. The amount of specialized knowledge required as a foundation to interpret and translate the Qur’an is immense.
Islamic scholars therefore long discouraged any translations of the Qur’an into other languages, insisting that readers needed to learn classical Arabic to access the content directly. The great twelfth-century scholar Al-Baghawi insisted that anyone doing exegesis of the Qur’an must have detailed knowledge of:
The many and diverse classical Arabic dialects;The grammar, syntax, and original root meaning of Arabic words;The diverse vernaculars of the Qur’an (known as Qira’at);Intimate details of the prophet Muhammad’s life;Awareness of the timing of each revelation, including its context and audience;Where each passage was placed in Muhammad’s final editing of the Qur’anic text;The various ways that Muhammad interpreted the passages, as chronicled in vignettes of Muhammad’s sayings to his followers (known as Hadith).By these standards, the Qur’an seems both locked away from popular appreciation and highly vulnerable to manipulation.
The Qur’an was first translated into English in 1649 by a Scottish writer who relied on a French translation that itself relied on an inaccurate medieval Latin translation. Only in the early twentieth century did Muslims begin to translate the Qur’an into English. These were primarily Indian writers responding to inroads made by zealous evangelists under British colonial rule. Competing with the King James Bible, these translations mimicked the latter’s style and attitude rather than providing an accurate depiction of the Qur’an’s own scriptural content.
Popular audiences reading these translated renditions are treated to a relatively uninspiring text that often appears perplexing, if not incoherent. Readers have a hard time conceiving how the Qur’an could have served as a uniquely inspiring text for millions of people over the past fourteen centuries, including polymath scholars who invented algebra, algorithms, and the camera.
Brilliant Muslim scholars applied Qur’anic insights to spark the medieval Islamic Golden Age filled with a mind-boggling outpouring of creativity in science, math, medicine, fashion, philosophy, economics, mental health therapy, architecture, art, and beyond. To those scholars, the Qur’anic experience went far beyond reading, chanting, or memorizing. The Qur’an was not merely ink on parchment, sounds emerging from someone’s throat, or ears listening to recitation. Rather it was the precious moment when inspired audiences found the courage to blossom out of stagnation, opening once-closed petals to reveal dormant potential ready to be unlocked.
Yet today the path to accessing these powerful insights seems blocked and impenetrable. The Qur’an remains distant from contemporary audiences in part because it is less a book than an interactive experience. In that sense, the Qur’an is a thoroughly postmodern work of art, a sui generis entity defying any preexisting categories to deliver multidimensional meditations transcending any standard narrative structure.
The Qur’an is a book with enormous power. When not understood properly, it can yield perilous results—similar to how powerful natural elements like hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen are vital components of air, soil, and water, yet can also be manipulated to manufacture explosives. A formidable life-giving force that can be misused for destruction, the Qur’an needs to be handled with care. Given the stakes, this book aims to translate the Qur’an’s ideas in meaningful ways for popular audiences—mirroring the Qur’an’s own effort to convey a mindset of blossoming to people of all backgrounds.
Appropriately, as an entity specifically designed to support audiences to chart paths out of confusion toward clarity, the Qur’an holds the keys to its own unlocking. It likens itself to a Hadi, a trailblazing guide helping travelers navigate out of seeming dead ends toward their desired destination. Defining itself is a passion for the Qur’an, whose formal name signifies the blossoming of new life. Other evocative terms it employs to describe itself include:
Hayah: a source of life;Ruh: an inspired fresh breath of life;Shifa: a source of internal healing;Furqan: an intelligent being capable of discernment;Hakim: a wise and self-aware counselor.The Qur’an presents itself as a mentor, offering brief inspirational exhortation, reassurance, and, on occasions, caution. It functions like an interactive personal trainer that can adapt different tones to meet the shifting needs of its audience—a coach that can only be useful if humans first take the initiative. A sophisticated and conscientious guide, the Qur’an empathizes with its audience because it too faced great challenges, though its own story remains largely obscured.
When readers hold a Qur’an today they grasp an edited version compiled under Muhammad’s supervision in the final two years of his life. Instead of presenting revelations sequentially, he oversaw the reworking and reordering of them until they were sculpted into a more sophisticated masterpiece. For example, the opening chapter of seven short verses dates from the first month of the Qur’an’s existence. The second chapter is forty-one times longer and was completed only fifteen days before Muhammad’s death. Moreover, one of the Qur’an’s final chapters has a verse inserted in it from the first few months of the Qur’an’s unfolding.
Copyright © 2024 by Mohamad Jebara